followers. Death here means nothing. What did John Lennon say about dying? “It’s like getting out of one car and into another.” Something like that. John Lennon was an agnostic or a Buddhist or a Hare Krishna or some crazy damn thing, but that part he got right. Too bad he didn’t know Jesus so he could find out just how right he was.
Mickey’s guns had never bothered his wife, Bev. Her father had been a hunter and she grew up in a house full of rifles and bows. Oddly enough, she became alarmed only when Mickey wanted to learn how to use them right. He joined a gun club and went there for target practice three days a week. When Jim, their oldest, turned ten, Mickey started to bring him along. Before he’d let Jim shoot, he taught the boy how to carry a gun and how to store it safely. How to check to see if it’s loaded, and how to clean it. He taught Jimmy respect for guns. Bev didn’t see it that way.
“I don’t like having all these weapons around,” she said. “I don’t like you getting Jimmy all excited about them. He buys the magazines now. And the catalogs. I want him to have other interests. I want him to play sports and have hobbies he can share with his friends at school, not just his daddy.”
“It’s just target practice,” Mickey told her. “It’s a sport he can enjoy all his life. Like golf.”
At the recommendation of a friend at the beer distributor where he worked, Mickey started meeting Tuesday nights with a special group. He called it Bible study, and Bev assumed it was a male-bonding thing somehow related to Promise Keepers and didn’t ask too much about it. It didn’t have anything to do with Promise Keepers.
They numbered thirteen and called themselves “The Hands of God.” They usually met in the kitchen of Phillip Hemley, who worked a white-collar job in Morgantown somewhere. Insurance. They talked about how modern-day religious institutions obscured the true word of God under a fog of politically correct bullshit. They talked about what God really said in the Bible, and what He preached in the non-canonical texts that the Catholics originally (and the Protestants since) have hidden from the flock. They talked about the words of God that the selfish and the weak didn’t want to hear.
Until one day when Mickey the Gerund suggested they stop complaining and do something about it.
A few weeks later, Mickey the Gerund came home to Bev and their sons and announced that he had quit his job. He sold their house, too (and put a down payment on a smaller place in another town), and had withdrawn about a third of their savings. I’ll be gone for a while, he told them. He’d return if he could, but then he’d be gone again soon after. Bev would have to support the boys on the few thousand he left them and on the money she made cutting hair.
The other members of the Hands of God had taken secretly from their own savings and given Mickey about $80,000 in cash. Phil, the insurance guy, said they were his “backers,” and they talked about it as if it was an investment, but they weren’t going to get their money back. They were sponsoring Mickey the way the kings and queens of Europe supported explorers to the New World, but for the Hands of God, the return would be everlasting life.
Two months later, Mickey returned to the smaller house as a new man, called into God’s army. He announced that he couldn’t love them anymore, that he was giving all his love, every bit of it, to God. To seal the covenant, Mickey explained, he had taken a razor blade and circumcised himself in a motel bathroom. Bev left with the kids that night, and the following week she took out a restraining order against him, which was insane. He told her he would never hurt them. In fact, he was sacrificing himself for them. He had answered God’s call, as Abraham did, and hadn’t God said to Abraham, I will bless you abundantly and make your descendants as countless as the stars and the sands of the seashore; your descendants shall take possession of the gates of their enemies and in your descendants all the nations of the earth shall find blessing – all this because you obeyed my command? His family would be rewarded for Mickey’s service. They had nothing to fear.
He stayed for another month or so, his split-level becoming the new headquarters (a church even) for the Hands of God, who made plans and studied maps and prayed together. They agreed on the details of the next expedition, and Mickey left in his Cutlass Supreme to make it all happen.
They made one mistake. In Memphis. One of the Hands insisted he had a friend down there – a like-minded friend – who could help with the operation. Reluctantly, Mickey agreed because the friend offered him a place to crash and the Memphis mission was going to take at least two weeks, which would devour a large chunk of his hotel budget.
After the two weeks were up, and the mission had just been completed, the friend ended up getting himself killed – shot in the chest by Memphis cops – and Mickey was nearly caught fleeing the scene. In a meeting, the Hands of God agreed that on the next job, in Chicago, and on every job after, Mickey would work alone.
At exactly four-thirty in the afternoon on his third day of surveillance outside the New Tech Fertility Clinic, he climbed over the front bench and crouched in the backseat. His windows weren’t tinted, but they were dirty, covered in dust and white water spots, and the rear dash was piled high with mystery paperbacks and magazines and maps and fast-food containers, all of which acted like military camouflage netting, protecting the inside of the car from curious eyes. He opened the pass-through and retrieved a narrow black plastic storage container from the trunk. He recalled the combination, and the box creaked apart in halves. Wedged in the foot well, he began assembling its contents.
– 5 -
Davis stood inside the desk at reception and opened the patient’s folder in his hands. He had his back to the waiting area, and when he looked up he could just see inside Joan Burton’s examining room.
In her white smock, with her back to him, talking to a young boy and his mother, Joan displayed none of her sensual curves. He couldn’t see any part of her perfectly oval face with its impossibly deep dimples or her long, elegant fingers or her thick ebony hair, which, when not restrained by pins and spray as it was now, sprung from her head in exciting, unpredictable ways. At a holiday party last year, Joan drew stares from every man and woman in the restaurant, with her hair framing her face like an ornate ceremonial headdress. Davis had stolen long, chaste looks at her all night.
He wrote down a list of prescription medications this patient was currently taking and returned to his office with the information, which he relayed to a pharmacist holding on the phone. Then he input the information into a computer file (where it belonged) and tossed the notepaper away.
Davis reached across the desk to his phone and dialed home. His wife picked up on a digital extension, and from the thinness of her voice Davis could tell she was outside in the garden.
“Hi,” she said.
“I’m coming home early,” Davis said. “Do you want me to grab something on the way?”
“Like what?”
“I dunno. Italian.”
“AK’s not here. And she’s eating over at Libby’s.”
“She told me. Is she sleeping over there?”
“Probably.”
“Perfect,” Davis said. “I’ll pick up something at Rossini’s for the two of us. You grab a nice bottle from downstairs. We haven’t had a date in a long time.”
“A very long time,” Jackie said.
“I’ll see you in half an hour,” he said. “I love you.”
“Bye,” she said.
Davis grabbed his sport coat and walked down the hall. He knocked on Joan’s open door – she was still consulting with a patient – but didn’t stop or say anything as he passed.
“Good night, Davis,” she called after him.
He waved to Ellen and she smiled back. The waiting room was empty, and he casually stooped to snatch some magazines from the couch and return them to the coffee table. He turned out a light that, to his irritation, others usually forgot to turn off. He detoured into a corner conference room and opened the vertical window blinds on a pair of adjacent exterior walls.
Outside, it was warm and humid, and the air stuck to his face like a plastic Halloween mask. There was an easy breeze from the lake, which did little more than push the heat around. There were no protesters at the curb,
